Creating Social-First Campaigns for Better Engagement

Lessons from CeraVe, Nutter Butter and more

At Tuesday’s Clio Creative Summit in New York, leaders from TBWA, Ogilvy, Dentsu Creative and VaynerMedia shared their strategies for crafting viral social media campaigns. The execs explained how to influence consumer behavior to generate higher consumer engagement. They appeared on a panel moderated by Krystle Watler, head of U.S. integrated marketing communications, TikTok for Business.

“Social-first marketing is really just audience-first marketing,” said Lesley Parks, executive strategy director for social and content at TBWA. “It’s thinking about who you’re going after and what sort of mindset they’re in on the platform. You have to create to the brief as well—but the audience comes first.”

Feedback in such forums can be almost instantaneous.

“You make something, you put it out to social media—whether it’s TikTok or another platform—and it’s gonna tell you exactly how well that piece performed,” said Rob Lenois, global CCO at VaynerMedia. “That can be terrifying. When I was coming up, craft was about making things look good and sound good. Now, craft is about grabbing and holding attention, which is a very different game.”

Social is “no longer just this thing that junior people do. It’s actually the future of this industry,” he said.

In 2024, CeraVe created a Clio Award-winning campaign that could blaze a path for others to follow. That work used teaser tactics and actor Michael Cera to beguile viewers and build buzz before the Big Game.

“We essentially spread a lie (about the nature of Cera’s brand involvement) so that we could reveal a product truth,” explained Charlotte Tansill, president of PR, social & influence at Ogilvy North America, which helped develop the work.

“In 2020, with the onset of the pandemic, CeraVe had been one of the first brands to really embrace TikTok and creator marketing,” Tansill said. “When this Super Bowl brief came in, they said, ‘We want a 360 campaign with a Super Bowl commercial, not a Super Bowl commercial with some cutdowns.’ So, we took a fundamentally different approach and created an experience that rolled out over 30 days, not 30 seconds. And we invited audiences to play a key role.”

Sure, brands with SB budgets can score. But Bridget Jewell, ECD at Dentsu Creative, the agency behind Nutter Butter’s successful TikTok account, noted that you sometimes don’t need huge bucks to strike social media gold.

“The misunderstanding is that social means low-fi,” said Jewell. “But it really means that you made it yourself. That you didn’t spend a lot of time on it. That you did it quickly. The craft is about the concept. It’s applying the right type of craft in the moment to reach the right audience.”

“You don’t have to have the highest level of production to make something successful,” she said.